... to spread the cement of brotherly love and affection, that cement
which unites us into one sacred band or society of brothers, among whom no
contention should ever exist, but that noble emulation of who can best
work or best agree ...

Masonic quotes by Brothers

ANCIENT TRUTHS

by Roger
M. Firestone, 32 KCCHThis article originally appeared in the October 1988 issue of
The Royal Arch Mason magazine

In Masonry, we are exposed to many symbols and emblems of
philosophical content, accompanied by lengthy lectures on morality and related
principles. We are proud to say that Masonry has existed "from time immemorial"
and trace the legendary history of the craft three thousand years into
antiquity. Perhaps the experienced members of the Craft overlook the question
that this may pose in the minds of newly admitted members: How can philosophical
thinking dating from two hundred and more years ago be of any meaning in this
modern and totally different world? Masonry is not alone in facing this
question; it confronts much of established religion as well. Surprisingly, the
modern age is beginning to develop some remarkable illustrations of the
relevance of the ancient truths we Masons profess, as these examples will
illustrate.

A sage of the Seventeenth Century Jewish sect called the
Hasidim ("Righteous Ones," approximately), said , "Keep two truths in your
pocket and take one or the other out as suits the needs of the moment. Let one
be, 'The universe was created for my sake.' Let the other be, 'I am but dust and
ashes.'" An earlier Jewish scholar, Akiba, once said, "Everything is
pre-ordained, yet free will is given."

Clearly, the Hasid meant this advice as a counterbalance to
his followers' changes in mood from day to day, aiding them in the task we have
all set ourselves of subduing our passions. Yet he did not call them advice or
epigrams, he called them "truths." Likewise, Akiba intended his statement to be
understood as a representation of the true structure of the world. How could
wise men expect their followers to accept such contradictory statements as both
being true?

From the philosophical point of view, we can attach symbolic
meaning to these statements and understand their truths in a non-literal sense.
We may interpret that for the universe to have been created for one's own sake,
each of us is responsible for doing as much good as he can during his time on
earth. To be reminded that we are "dust and ashes" is to admonish us against
arrogance and believing that we are better than others, which might thereby lead
us to mistreat them as our inferiors. Akiba's formulation reminds us that each
individual can choose his own deeds, no matter how fixed the course of events
seems. We recall that some ancient members of the Craft chose to withdraw from a
murderous conspiracy, which ultimately absolved them of their guilt, even though
the ultimate design was carried out. In the modern-day tyranny of Nazism, there
were those who took actions to oppose it and save the lives of others, while
dissidents in the Soviet Union today may be seeing benefits of their long
suffering.

However, not only can these various statements be given
figurative interpretation, they are in fact meaningful descriptions of the
physical universe as scientists have been able to describe it. As the technical
details may be too much to plunge into at first, it is worthwhile to consider a
simpler and more familiar example or two. Virtually everyone in the Western
world is acquainted with the creation story found in the book of Genesis. In the
story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, we read that, as punishment for
having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, women are to bear children in pain and
travail. There are a number of interpretations of this passage, ranging from the
literal fundamentalist evaluation as actual history to radical feminist ones
that view the story as men creating a justification for oppression of women.
From the point of view of biology and medicine, however, there is nothing
surprising about this story. Physicians have known for quite some time that the
primary reason for the difficulty of human delivery as compared to that of the
lower animals is the comparatively large size of the human head at birth. Why is
a baby's head so large? Because each of us is born with every brain cell that we
will ever have in our lives. A smaller head size would not provide sufficient
brain capacity for the development of human-level cognitive potential. Thus, the
ability to know good from evil, as described in Genesis, is inextricably linked
with the pain and difficulty of human labor. When creating the Garden-of-Eden
story, did the ancient sages realize as much as is now understood by modern
medicine but formulate the story as an allegory so as to appeal to the less
sophisticated members of the community? We can only speculate.

Moving from biology to physics, we can find a more advanced
example earlier in Genesis. During the Creation, as described there, we read
that light was created on the first day, yet the sources of light we now see,
the sun, moon, and stars, did not appear until later. Students of Scripture were
puzzled at how light could exist without any of the usual light-giving bodies,
and many interpretations were offered. Today, the widely-accepted Big Bang
theory of cosmology tells us that the description in Genesis is precisely the
order in which things occurred. Infinitesimal fractions of a second after the
"Big Bang," the universe consisted entirely of fundamental subatomic particles.
Within a very short time, the unstable ones broke down into the constituents of
today's universe: protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos and photons, or light
quanta. For the first several thousand years of the universe's existence,
energy, in the form of radiation, was the dominant element in the universe;
there was light everywhere, without stars or planets to shine or reflect it.
After an event known as "decoupling," matter replaced radiation as the principal
constituent of the universe. Millions of years later, as the universe continued
to expand and the temperature dropped, the primordial soup of particles began to
condense into atoms and they into macroscopic objects, such as galaxies, stars,
and ultimately the sun and moon. To be sure, this process did not take the
Biblical six days, and we can be quite certain that the ancients who wrote
Genesis I knew nothing of modern cosmology. Yet it is surprising to find how
much of this allegory from the distant past is confirmed by our present
sophisticated understanding of science.

The philosophical paradoxes of later authors are going to
require more effort to comprehend, so let us now turn to Akiba's epigram and
consider the contradiction between free will and predestination. To a scientist,
it would be seen as a striking summation of the confluence of microscopic and
macroscopic worlds of physics. During the late 19th century, classical physics
developed the study of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gasses. By the
end of the century, the theory of atoms and molecules was well-enough developed
that the size and number of molecules was appreciated. A cubic foot of air
contains sextillions of molecules of its various component elements, nitrogen,
oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and so on. The classical physicists
believed that they understood the mathematics underlying the physics
sufficiently that, if the behavior of each molecule could be computed, the
overall behavior of the gas would be known in every detail.

Those physicists recognized that no such computation would be
possible. Even the computers of today, which can perform over a billion
calculations a second, would require many billions of years to predict the
behavior of each individual molecule in a roomful of air for even a fraction of
a second. Yet the overall properties of the behavior of gasses was known quite
well nearly a hundred years ago. In a sense, each molecule has "free will" while
the gas as a whole follows precise physical laws.

The modern theory of quantum mechanics takes this one step
further. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle introduced indeterminacy into
physics in a fundamental sense. No longer was it merely our inability to perform
the computations that limited our knowledge, but rather the basic laws of
physics themselves. Even when dealing with a single molecule, atom, or subatomic
particle, its behavior is predictable only in a statistical sense. Nonetheless,
the Bohr Complementarily Principle makes it possible for everyday physical laws
to continue to predict behavior of the universe, just as they did before quantum
mechanics was discovered. Thus we see that much is predictable on a large scale,
while freedom or indeterminacy continues for the individual particle a singular
reflection of Akiba's statement.

So, too, can it be said that we are dust and ashes. Current
thinking in cosmology and astrophysics is that the only atoms created by the
process of the "Big Bang" were hydrogen and helium, along with a ferocious
torrent of radiation. Yet we are clearly made of more substantial stuff. Where
did the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements that make up our bodies and
the world around us come from? Astronomers believe they came from inside stars
created earlier in the history of the universe. These massive stars, far larger
than the Sun, burned their hydrogen atoms to helium by nuclear fusion. Much of
the helium, too, was likewise consumed, creating heavier atoms all the way up to
iron, the most stable nucleus. Without further fuel, there was no energy to
support the star's outer layers and the star collapsed, leading to a gigantic
explosion known as a supernova, such as the one that occurred in 1987 in the sky
of the Southern Hemisphere . The energy released in the explosion served both to
"cook" elements heavier than iron and distribute those elements into
interstellar space. These heavy elements were later condensed from the
interstellar dust by the formation of new solar systems, such as ours. So we are
literally composed of the "dust and ashes" of the explosion of previous stellar
systems, whose expiration made our existence possible.

Can the universe really have been created for our sake? At
first, this seems too self-centered a notion to be entertained. From ancient
times to the early Renaissance, Aristotle, Ptolemy and their successors believed
that the earth was the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, planets, and
stars all revolved about it. The Copernican Revolution put an end to that. We no
longer believe that the Earth, the Sun, or even our own galaxy is the center of
all Creation. However, 20th century physics brought us both quantum mechanics
and relativity, and one curious feature of both these theories is that the
observer plays a critical role in determining what is observed. One famous
"thought experiment" of quantum mechanics ("Schrödinger's cat") illustrates that
the role of the observer can literally be a matter of life and death—a cat in a
sealed box can be considered neither alive nor dead in any real sense until the
box is opened and the actual fact observed. (Here is a parallel to Masonry: No
one can be made a Mason passively, by communication; he must observe the degrees
as a participant to achieve enlightenment.)

Recent thinking about the role of the observer in quantum
mechanics has led to what is known as the Anthropic Principle. Succinctly, it
states that the universe is the way we see it because we are here to make that
observation. In other words, a universe created differently (that is, with
different values of the fundamental constants of physics, for example) might be
a universe devoid of life. Perhaps there have been many creations, these
cosmologists reason, but only this one has the "recipe" correct for there to be
human beings alive in it. In this sense, we can see that indeed the universe
might have been created just for each one of us.

These are not the only examples to be found. Nearly every
religion expounds a Golden Rule that advocates a balance between our behavior
toward others and that of others toward ourselves. How often have we found that
a kindness to another is returned to us through some unexpected means? In
physics, we find that one of the most powerful set of laws is that pertaining to
symmetry and conservation. There are dozens: Laws of conservation of energy,
conservation of momentum, conservation of charge, time-reversal symmetry, and so
on. The realm of human behavior as revealed thousands of years ago appears to be
governed by just such laws, as well.

At first, we may be surprised that these ancient truths can
find confirmation in the theories of modern physics. Perhaps we should be less
astonished when we remember the words of Carlyle: "The universe is but one vast
symbol of God." The ultimate Source of Truth has many ways to reveal that Truth.
We should not be at all surprised to find that those different ways lead to the
same truth, whether through the philosophical and allegorical revelations
available to the ancients who lacked our knowledge of science, or through
modern-day understanding of the physical universe. But how much more should we
believe and follow these ancient doctrines when they are confirmed to us through
the science of a skeptical age!

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